I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

My private measure of success is daily. If this were to be the last day of my life would I be content with it? To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

If we don't bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

A Baba Yaga never breaks a promise. Legs, yes. Hearts, occasionally. But never a promise.

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

That's our job - to strap rockets onto everything.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

My first exploration through art was really through music - I've trained classically with piano for about ten years.

Most importantly, the meaning of spirituality lays the seeds for our destiny and the path we must follow.

The tea party venerates the Constitution while despising the political system it has produced.

Yoga is somewhat hard to quantify in terms of benefits because you see them in all the injuries you don't get.

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.